Dating : Story of the Monster Who Wasn’t

As every thought and idea ever uttered in any unearthed, atrophied, that is, human, mind, the monster never had any definitive shape or name. The people knew it as a nightmare and panic. People knew him in his many shapes, its many fear spheres, and felt often its unbearable essence exuding, pulling down and up in every form to create and destroy.

The shapes and matters were stranger than himself. In many places, it was a shadow; in other places, he was a big, hairy, carnivorous creature. In another place, its face became abstract and blank; in other places, it was but a bunch of numbers and letters strung together, with cute little graphs and a bunch of productivity percentages. In someplace it was death itself, in some place, it was the pale imitation of life, in some place, it was a fly dressed in ties, in some places it was an underground majesty, in some places it was a prison, and in some places, it was a tortured, ravaged, liberated world.

He meant to have its shapes terrifying, as every living being should, but he became tired and unable to rest. People, he found out the bad way, were afraid all the time and it was only one and only one, the only one had to travel, and exhaust himself turning and changing and twisting into a monster nightmare after horror after nightmarish illusion after deathly visions, on and on and on. Mistakes were made, emphasized with fatigue. He began to let himself go and even renounced his base form, it left its gender, and moved sloppily in between each fright. It entered the wrong houses in the wrong shapes, it talked of its problems and personal crisis, it came closer to understanding more about life than any real person did with a real life and a real house but nobody listened to it. They were too busy being frightened of him, and later, of laughing at him, because he was a monster clown with a tutu dress or ghost with an evening dress doing its taxes.

Stories of the monster spread fast and soon nobody really paid attention to it. What was the point of a monster who so easily could get confused? What was the point of a monster that scared them and made them laughed so badly and kept returning for more every time? It was just so stupid that it couldn’t possibly be deceiving anyone. They decided to leave those duties to real people who were less honest but more pleasant to look at.

Nobody ever questioned what the purpose of such a monster was because if they had, they would have found out that it didn’t have one just like them. It had stumbled upon a life, with no mother and no father like many others, it had found one of the few things that it could do barley right and feed itself from it, and it tried its best to live its life the best it could, like no one else. And it became so lost in changing shapes and failing to scare and sliding off from people’s nightmares, that it deluded itself, that these people were its friends, that they could like it, that it could make them like it.

But they never did because people had no time for monsters and even less time for friends. When there were no people left, since they had all died of old age and catastrophic capitalistic extinction, the monster felt sad for all eternity. It went back to his roots and tried to remember… to remember as much as possible. He thought a lot of the people who could have liked him, the anecdotes it should be able to remember but did not, and all the shapes he used to learn, practice and be over and over again so that people could see, though they never did, how much they had in common with it.